Can every letter be used as a silent letter?

Can every letter in the English language be used in a silent way? Like the b in numb?
But at least one example for all 26 letters. Kind of a nerdy question but has anyone succeeded? I have tried and failed... Don’t ask why!

But BQ, "acquisition" is itself a Latin borrowing, via French. And if you deny "Sioux" you must deny also "platypus" and "octopus" along with "original" and "poster," the last two both from Latin. Where does i end?

james, you're assuming that spelling determines pronunciation, and it doesn't, otherwise "give" and "dive" would rhyme. The T in "listen" is unetymological - the Old English word was "lysna", and the T was added thru confusion with the synonymous verb "list". But if the T hadn't been added, the word would still be pronounced the same.

Martin, I found your comment about the double letters in Nordic language interesting. However, in the English language, if a person who had never known the word jazz before, and heard it aloud and was asked to spell it, that person might have spelled it as jaz because the extra Z is unnecessary in the pronunciation of the word.

In response to Shaun's comment: in my list of words I was mostly talking about the silent letters as not being audible when spoken aloud, rather than if a letter was taken away from the word, the end result would still sound the same. For example, the E in lime is necessary to the pronunciation of the word (yes, without the E it would rhyme with dim) but you cannot hear the E as a separate vowel in the word. In the Spanish language, lime would be pronounced LEE-may—the E having its own distinct "ay" sound. What I mean by the silent letters in the words you picked out:

fudge - I often don't hear the D distinctly pronounced when spoken.

marijuana - The J is inaudible in English. The word could be mariuana.

balm - I don't say bam instead of balm, but I don't pronounce the L. I say "bahm".

lacquer - Because of the C, I find the Q unnecessary. In fact, the U is also unnecessary because the word is pronounced LAK-er, the K representing the hard C sound.

February - Nobody I know says FEB-roo-air-ee. They say FEB-you-air-ee.

fivepence - This one was a stretch. In some English dialects, however, I have heard fivepence said as fi'pence.

stray - The A alone could have a long vowel sound (even though this occurrence would be rare in English). Yes, that being said, bra could sound like bray if you thought about it.

As for my dialect? I guess I'm a hybrid. My dad's family is from North Carolina, but he's lived in Massachusetts for most of his life. His accent is pretty neutral as far as Massachusetts goes (nothing heavy like Boston) but occasionally I will hear a little bit of a southern accent in his voice. My mum is from Cheshire, England—she grew up in Manchester and Macclesfield and moved to America about 16 years ago. My accent is fairly neutral but sometimes I will speak with tinges of southern US or northern England.

I have a problem with a lot of words that people are saying have silent letters in them.

Someone said that the "i"'s in Hawaii were silent when in fact the Hawaiian language is polynesian and built upon pronouncing each letter and the letters often sound like the way you would say them in spanish which means that the two i's together sound like an e... making ha-why-e.

a word like "talk" or "walk" You would have to have the l's or you would end up saying tak or wak.

vogue was used at some point for the e to be silent but really the e is what makes the word sound like va-oh-g/ugh. with out the e you get vo-goo.

often was used for the t, while it is arguably pronounced either with the t or with out the t and correct either way... the word often comes does from old english "oft" which would mean the original way to say often would be off-ten.

basically what I'm getting at is that just because you don't think you say the letters you see you actually do need them to make the letters surrounding them sound correctly. a word like psychology technically does not need the p to sound the same to us,( but the root word psykhe was Greek and they needed their trident looking letter (Psi) in order to spell psykhe... thusly why the p is there in the first place. )

Also... just about everyone has an accent (of some kind or to someone from another area) and will pronounce things differently upon where they grew up and how they learned and developed speech patterns. Lots of times we think there are silent letters in words simply because of the way our brain visualizes things. For instance studies have shown that your brain can actually see the shape of words (outline of the whole word... esp in words that we know well) and instead of you reading each individual letter you actually instantly know what the word is by shape. It is like if you see the out line of a tree you know that it is a tree. You see the word "the" and you don't have to tell your brain "ok the t next to an h makes a thhh sound and the e makes an eee sound so that is thheee... the". So when our brain visualizes things and we don't read each letter it is easy to say "Apple" has a silent e when really if the e was not there the word would be pronounced more like you were saying "appel" which still has an e in it but CAN be silent.

These lists are problematic. Depending on your accent or dialect, letters may or may not be silent. In both of the lists submitted so far I can disagree with several entries. The definition of silent is also open to question - does a true silent letter have no bearing on the pronunciation or can it influence the pronunciation.

examples: aisle - isle - I'll (silent 'a' and 's') - In some accents those are homophones and in others not.

Y: Malaysia - the 1st part of the name is "Malay" with the Y most definitely pronounced as in “Malay-sia”.

Words like 'game' do not have truly silent letters as the 'e' modifies the pronunciation of the 'a'. This is an argument that could go on ad infinitum. Some letters are silent as spellings have not kept up with the language.

Not all "silent" letters are silent in all accents and dialects. For example, in Claudia's list I disagree with:

- d in fudge- e in lime (without the e it rhymes with tim, with the e it rhymes with time)- j in marijuana (it's a spanish word and 'ju' gives you the 'w' sound)- l in balm (I say balm, not bam)- q in lacquer (lac-ker)- r in February (missing the r in February is sloppy pronunciation)- v in fivepence (weird - the v in five is always pronounced.- y in stray (without the y, it's just stra which rhymes with bra)

Phlegm relates to Phlegmatic in which the G is pronounced, I think it counts but it's arguable.

Often is often pronounced off-tun.

Foreign words are tricky to draw a line on. Can we say that words borrowed from other languages in which that word is still used and the word is recognizably foreign, don't count? I'm not sure. Faux, for example, is clearly French but they borrowed it too.

I'm struggling to think of a word that hasn't been borrowed and bastardized somewhere. In fact, I can think of one, Dog, for which no one knows the origin. Until very recently we only had the word hound.

Many of the strange English spellings come about for the purpose of reading. Here's a few - 'd' in fudge is there to protect short 'u' from becoming a long 'u' with 'e' following the consonant 'g'. It says its name, a 'j' sound, mostly when followed by e, i, or y. Words such as balm, calm have the 'l' for the purpose of making the vowel 'a' make one of its long sounds. So yes, 'l' is silent in the spoken word but without it, following the spelling rules, the 'a' would become a short vowel when followed by a consonant and we would mispronounce the word. The 'y' in words such as stray also gives a long 'a' sound, thanks to 'y' that can also replace 'i' or 'e'. Right again with the 'u' being silent in vogue. This is also spelt with a letter protecting the previous vowel and also 'g'. Without u the word would read voge but not pronounced the way we do. That bossy 'e' would be telling 'g' to say its name, giving us the sound of voje. Many English words have retained their old spelling but over the years, the pronunciation has modified. I guess we could use halfpenny for the silent 'f'' as it was pronounced as hayp-nee. Lime needs its 'e' to make the vowel long, so 'e' is there for spelling so we can identify it. Give and Have are words that are suspected of once being pronounced as they are spelt, but as Old and Middle English words don't end in 'v', words that do, are mostly foreign words. As with foreign words, we have now accepted their spelling but pronounce them with our own particular accents. Yep, I love the English language!

I have to disagree. talk is correctly pronounced like t-al-k (like saying tall and adding a k) same with walk w-al-k (again like wall with a k) otherwise you would say tak and wak. Again I'll say that a lot of it has to do will accents that people have but the "L" in talk and walk is not supposed to be silent.

thanks for all responses to this inane question, i really appriciate all of these contributions...I suppose there are differing phonetic pronounciations with many words depening on accents & dialects...(north american & europian mainly). but as a general rule...(like my post above) suppose the letter we are trying to give a silent example of were to be removed from the word...would it still be pronounced the same way. This is, I guess, my loose parameter for this. for example take the t out of listen and you have a different pronounciation.we are very close though to the full alphabet...nice work!

How about Worcestershire? There's a whole string of silent letters. Why, it's missing an entire syllable! (traditionally pronounced "woos-ter-sheer" or "wus-ter-shur" or a few other variations). The R is usually silent. So's the C, perhaps the O (or the E) too. While it is the name of a place, "worcestershire sauce" is common enough that I would say it doesn't have to be considered a proper noun. There are a lot of English towns and cities that get shortened this way.

With "acquire" I'd say the C was silent, not the Q. I'm struggling with Q, but reminded of the Monty Python bookshop sketch - "four M's and a silent Q".As for silent J, how about "fajitas"?Silent M - "mnemonic" seems to work.Silent O - "phoenix"?And you can add "swimming pool" to the silent P's (!)I agree with James above. I wouldn't say "mate" has a silent E because the E affects the pronunciation of the word.

Oh yeah, to add to the list for silent letters:i: eight, freighto: people [which is also often pronounced with a soft l]Thanks, Peter, also, for pontacq [70+points for Scrabble]On the flip side of this, how many English words have pronounciations of a letter that the word does not contain?a: eight, weighbcd: e: ziti, f: laugh, phone, [anything with gh]g:h:celloi: eye, [Thames], lymph;thymej:k: chil:m:n:o:______eauxp:q:r:s: pizza, psi, ci____; xut:u:ewe;too, to,....................v: ofw: one; chihuahuax: ecstasyy: llamaz: xi

AnWulf: That is the first thing that I thought when I saw "talk." In my part of Maryland, we generally pronounce the "l" in "talk." What blows my mind is that some people pronounce "Mary," "merry," and "marry" all differently.

Aussie: The "e" in "give" and "have" were absolutely pronounced at one time - not just suspected to have been pronounced. "Give" and "have" are related to the German "geben" and "haben." The "e" in "Ich gebe" and "Ich habe" are still pronounced. Also - and you can see this in these two words - German words with a "b" are often written in English as a "v." Fieber=Fever; heben= to heave; Liebe=love; leben=to live; Grab=grave; schieben=to shove.

Your explanation of the "y" in "stray" may or may not be correct, but as in the above, German can also explain a "y" (although not in the case of "stray"). There is a connection between the English "y" and the German "g." Tag=Day; Gelb=Yellow; legen=to lay; mögen=may.

I don't think the "l" in "balm" and "calm" are there for spelling purposes. For one, many English speakers pronounce that "l." "Balsam" and "balm" are related and both have an "l."

People are getting too carried away with what the silent letter does to the word. The whole point is words with letters that are silent, not, 'If the silent letter were removed we would say the word differently so it's not a silent letter'.

'Walk' and 'talk' most certainly have a silent 'L'. Talking about what the word would be without the 'L' is besides the point of this conversation.

As for 'vogue' I would submit that it's the 'u' that is silent, not the 'e'.

Letter (B) is not pronounced when following (M) at the end of a word.ClimbCrumbDumbCombBomb

Letter (C) is not pronounced when following (S).ScienceSceneScientificScientist Scion (a young member of a rich and famous family).

Letter (D) is not pronounced in the following common words: HandkerchiefWednesdayBridgeWedge (a piece of metal, wood, rubber, etc).

Letter (E) is not pronounced at the end of words and usually makes the vowel long. HopeDriveGaveWriteSide

Letter (G) is often not pronounced when followed by an (N).ChampagneForeignSignFeign (to pretend to feel something, usually an emotion, to nag).

Letter (GH) is not pronounced before (T) and at the end of many words.ThoughtThroughDaughterLightMightRightDough Weigh

Letter (H) is not pronounced when following (W). WhatWhenWhereWhetherWhy

Letter (H) is not pronounced at the beginning of many words.HourHonestHonorHeirHerb (a type of plant whose leaves are used in making medicine).

Letter (H) is pronounced at the beginning of these common words.HillHistoryHeightHappyHangover (a feeling of illness after drinking too much alcohol).

Letter (K) is not pronounced when followed by (N) at the beginning of a word.KnifeKneeKnowKnockKnowledgeKnew

Letter (L) is often not pronounced before (D, F, M, and K). CalmHalfShouldTalkWould BalkSalmon

Letter (N) is not pronounced following (M) at the end of a word. AutumnHymn (religious song).Solemn ( serious and without any amusement).

Letter (P) is not pronounced following letter (S, N). PsychologyPneumoniaPsalter Pneumatic (operated by air pressure).Psychotherapy (the treatment of mental illness by discussing the problems which caused it with the sufferer, instead of using drugs or operations).

Letter (S) is not pronounced before (L) in the following words. IslandIsleAisle

Letter (T) is not pronounced in these common words. CastleChristmasFastenListenOftenWhistle

Letter (U) is not pronounced following (G) and before a vowel. Guess GuidanceGuitarGuest

Letter (W) is not pronounced at the beginning of a word followed by an (R). WrapWriteWrongWreckage

In southern Ontario and around Toronto you will hear "Tronna" or "Tronno". In a s. Ont village called Palmerston - for reasons unknown - it's locally pronouced as "pamerston". My mum says she can barely tell apart a Canadian 'd' from a Canadian 't'.

Marijuana doesn't actually have a silent J - it has a Spanish J - marihuana; 'ju' same as in Juan. Sometimes letters get added as well, my relatives back in Somerset usually call Canada "Canader".. I also heard Justin Lee Collins refer to Chicago as "Sher-cargo". Damn rhotics!

English will be a great language if we ever figure out how to spell it - or even agree on what to pronounce!

You don't need walk or talk for the L. Would, could and half should cover it.If you want a silent E without changing pronunciation, consider above and give.Finally, for the silent R, I give you chitterlings.

@Dean. I think you're cheating a bit with almond and dinghy, and perhaps even with honour. There are still sounds there; they wouldn't sound the same if you take away the letter altogether, as with 'listen, hour' etc. The 'gh' in dinghy is a specific sound, /ŋ/, not just g and h together, otherwise it would be 'dinhy'.

/ˈɑːmənd//ˈdɪŋi/

and even with honour, /ˈɑːnər, the sound of British 'ou', or American 'o' is not 'u', but the schwa.

Goofy, agreed and point taken. but as a very general rule it sort of works, I suppose for people (like myself) who don't use 'unetymological' regularily or have much of a phonetic idea of the root etymology of english words, we can agree to overlook some fundamentals .thanks, though, for pointing that out.

I agree that double letters (like the 'ff' in 'cliff' or the 'zz' in 'jazz') don't really count—they're both part of the same pronunciation.

As far as foreign words, if any monolingual native English speaker would use it as an English word, it definitely counts. So, for example, my semi-literate monolingual English speaking neighbor might talks about a "midnight rendezvous" without even knowing how it's spelled, and no one gives a second thought to the term 'grand prix' when they're at the racetrack, even if they do recognise it as French. Also, words like 'tsunami' are clearly foreign, but the fact that it has a separate pronunciation in English (without the 't') makes it count.

For the sake of interest, I'm going to exclude place names altogether unless they're common international place names like Antarctica.

For those saying that words like 'talk' and 'walk' don't count because they change the pronunciation, maybe a better way to think of it is like this: If someone (a child learning to read or a non-native speaker, for example) pronounces the letter and it sounds wrong, it counts as a silent letter.

And yes, obviously it all depends on your dialect. The best responses are words with letters that are never pronounced by native speakers in casual conversation.

Fun thread indeed! After reading all of these, I am convinced that the only letters never silent in English language [excluding proper nouns] are f, [unless you must debate the ff sounds], r, and v. Walk, talk, caulk, and many others with 'lk', have the l as audible but pronounced as a soft w sound. And thanks, Peter, for reminding me about 'fjord'. Thanks, everyone, for extending my [Scrabble] vocabulary.

The "L" is definitely not silent in "walk" and "talk". They may not *sound* like l's, but they're not pronounced "wack" and "tack". Come to think of it, there may be places where they *are* pronounced like that. Wall+k comes awfully close to "walk". Similar to "caulk". Some people insist that word is pronounced "cock". As in "Give me your caulk so I can squeeze it until some white goo comes out." I absolutely pronounce the "L"! But "could" has a silent "L".

Peter, you pronounce "fifth" like "fith"? I pronounce both f's. I pronouce "fjord" like "fee-ord", but maybe that's just me. I could argue that savvy is "sav-vy" and not "sav-ee", but agree that it's debatable. I also pronounce the R in February, but mostly to be a smarty-pants jerk, since "normal" people don't.

And while I realize that pretty much all English words come from other languages, I'm bothered, in this thread, by "obviously" French words, such as, well, anything ending in X, and "rendezvous". Wait...what about phoenix? Not a silent x, but a silent o....

I think the proper way to pronounce "tsunami" is "tidal wave". But what about "settle"? I suppose some smarty-pants jerk will say it's "set-tle", not "set-le.

According to Wikipedia, the "j" in marijuana "seem(s) to be an innovation of English"(!) I pronounce it as in "Me and Mary wanna smoke some." Again, we come to regional accents.

Chris B:In "fajitas" the J is pronounced as English H.Likewise, in "tortilla" LL is pronounced Y (or sometimes more of a j sound). Using Spanish pronunciation is not making the letters actually silent.

Hunter:It is my accent (South Essex). I say "people" more like "peepou". Likewise I often drop Gs and Ts, though I would use a glottal stop. I know some people will think my pronunciation is just lazy and not a good example to use here.

I know we now have some examples for L, but I'd like to add that "could" not only has a silent L but shouldn't have an L at all. "Would" and "should" are from "will and "shall", so preserve the L, but "could" is from "can", so ought to be spelt "coud". Chaucer wrote "koude". "Could" is an unetymological spelling.

Shaun, It's absolutely impossible to explain further. I have written my pronunciation as well as I can, and I can't explain further *how* I manage to talk that way. Probably only Henry Higgins has a phonetic alphabet up to the job of getting the precise sound across. Listen very carefully to people from the right part of Essex. I don't know how far this phenomenon spreads. I wasn't even aware I was doing it until it was pointed out to me.Roughly where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?

I can't stop laughing about richardpry's pronunciation of "people". I shouldn't laugh, and no one should challenge him on it--an IQ of less that 70 is correlated to his exact pronunciation: "pee-po". LOL!

Shaun C:I agree with what you say about "game" and similar words. I'd call 'a-e' a digraph just like 'ai'. You wouldn't say "bait" had a silent "i", would you? However I'd say words like "caste" and "gaffe" do indeed have silent E's.

Other Chris:Well done on that list, even if there's the odd dubious one in there. Marijuana looks good for J. Lacquer is probably as close as you get to a silent Q. Regarding "Lefebvre" (which I've seen as a single word), I think the B is silent, not the V.

I think Richie's pronunciation of "people" is pretty normal for that part of the country. Final L's, as well as L's in words like "milk", turn into W's. Interestingly, here in NZ you hear something similar: "milk" often comes out like "muwk".

I see a few place names bandied about. I reckon we could just about do the whole alphabet with place names alone, for example Wymondham (in Norfolk) which has three silent letters.

How about gateaux or bureaux for x? I know they are both of french origin but are commonly used in English. The plural with the x sounds identical to the singular without the x, therefore the x must be silent.

Shaun, I think Chris' point is that there is a "u" there, too. If it were Mariuana, one could make a case that that 'u" would have the same pronunciation without the "j" as with. It's not mari-ana, it's mari-uana, right? Personally, I think the spelling is awkward enough without the "j" to make it unclear about how to pronounce it, so I'm not sure whether I'd count it or not.

@Tom in TX ... Yu made me laugh with the caulking gun! Can yu see someone saying he needed caulk without saying the 'L'? LMAO! ... And I like yur way of saying "tsunami"!

For fjord, I say it like fyord. The j in other germanic tungs is often our y.

OTOH, in Spanish, the j is our h. (The h in Spanish is silent!) The ju is hw so Juan (John) is said like hwan ... Juana (Jane) is said as hwana. Thus, marijuana is said like ma-ri-hwa-na. BTW, the etym of MJ is ... marijuana: altered by influence of Spanish proper name Maria Juana "Mary Jane" from mariguan (1894), from Mex.Sp. marihuana, of uncertain origin.

The more commonly benoted words in English, huru (especially) in speech are of Anglo-Germanic roots. Academia and bureaucrats tilt heavily, and often needlessly, towards Latinates.

With all due respect, this is quite pathetic. It has been four years and you lot have not even been able to write down a full list with each of the silent letters. AYE, silent letters may occur literally from A to Z, ye have been just too clumsy to prove the theory.

There, I won and I didn't even break sweat. Those of you who say foreign words are not allowed: are you brainless? English has been forged from many a tongue, moreover this is the very reason why it has manifold spelling in the first place! O, poverty in wit! Anywise it be, I hereby accept the gold medal.